Bringing the Economy home from the Market

Keith Hudson, in his post of Feb.10th, referred to LETSystems. I
thought it might be of interest to post the following review of
Ross V.G.Dobson's "Bringing the Economy Home from the Market."
Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1993. 235 pp. This is a much
abbreviated version of a review published in "Together", a now
discontinued magazine of very limited circulation. The book
consists of three distinct parts. Part I is a theoretical
introduction; Part II is a historical narrative of the efforts to
introduce a local barter system into the Winnipeg region, and
Appendix I is a 47-page collection of poster-like illustrations
explaining in great detail every aspect of "Building Community
with Barter Credit". There is a good bibliography and a first
class index. Dobson has a strong political message, which is to
show how a certain type of barter, based on a Local Employment
and Trading System (LETS) could facilitate the creation of true
community. He concludes that a community will only be healthy and
sustainable if local production is fostered and used to
substitute for imports, as Jane Jacobs has described in The
Economy of Cities. Only thus can value be retained in the
community rather than being exported and taken out of local
circulation.

I presume that most readers will be familiar with Michael
Linton's LETSystem which he pioneered in Courtenay B.C.
LETSystems now operate in many parts of the world. Some are
listed in Appendix III of the present volume; reference to many
others can be found in the Magazine of the New Economics
Foundation, London UK or in an electronic bulletin board devoted
to the subject on the WEB network.

Dobson believes that our economic system, facilitated by
money, destroys community. Local Economic Development, with its
ties to the money system and the market economy, cannot create a
true community. Community Economic Development has to sever its
ties with the money system. The community envisaged by Dobson is
idealistic and is based on a different ethic to that of
competition and the market -- an ethic of giving, of trust and of
cooperation. Dobson bravely admits its utopian character but is
convinced that such a community is now possible. The values
proposed are not new, they are the values of the home -- the true
oikonomia --in contrast to the chrematistics of the marketplace
(the debt to Herman Daly and John Cobb's For the Common Good is
acknowledged). They are the values of the ordinary material life
of most people in history, or at least of an idealized version of
such a life. After an initial disastrous experience with a
LETSystem in Winnipeg, Dobson turned to a study of pre- and early
industrial history through the work of Fernand Braudel to find a
theoretical underpinning for his views on money. He concludes
that, in the context of community, money -- or at least money as
a commodityis --the root of all evil. A very large part of the
book is taken up with the question of money, All semblance of a
tie between the money system and LETS trading must be avoided.
The Community Circle in Winnipeg have adopted the term "Barter
Credit" for the record of a transaction. These transactions are
gifts, the Barter Credit comes into being only after the gift has
been made. The obligation thus recorded is not to the trading
partner but to the community. In this description we can begin
to see the revolution in ethics required by the new system.

In the second part of the book, interspersed with some
theoretical discussion which has been summarized above, Dobson
describes the restart of the LETSystem under the auspices of an
organization called the Community Circle and its renaming as a
Barter Credit Network. The Circle had about 50 members a year
after inauguration and four years later (1992) the membership had
risen to about 200.

For those planning to set up a LETSystem, some of the
most interesting parts of the book will be Dobson's discussion of
specific problems such as the incorporation of regular businesses
into the system (which could be achieved only through a
compromise in principle); the question of security and guarantees
which causes Dobson much anguish; and the possible application of
sanctions against those that abuse the system. Dobson also
addresses, but does not resolve to my satisfaction at least, the
problem of establishing values in trading when divorced from the
money system. As Robert Bellah and his colleagues observe, in
"The Good Society," "...if we had to barter for everything, we
would never know what anything was worth and we would spend our
whole lives bargaining." When all is said and done, it has to be
admitted that separation from the money system can never be total
"...for it alone will provide much of what we want, and even some
of what we need for a long time -- perhaps forever."